One of my earlier jobs I started as a mid-level engineer who had aspirations of doing data science/ML work. The leadership team really liked me and 6 months later I was leading a small team of data scientists. The company started losing momentum and leadership changed so 1 year later I was off to a new gig (with many other coworkers, including the founders).

Much later in my career I found my self far more knowledge, far more skilled and yet at a lower level reporting to people who had been in my exact situation as before only they were just luckier. The frustrating thing I found is that many of these people in "leadership" roles never ended up learning much more after their initial role required, why would the average person?

That said, I'm not nearly as frustrated by this anymore. I write code because I genuinely enjoy the craft, and I like getting paid to solve interesting problems. Career for me has always been secondary to learning and building things. For me at least, I realized that I was grateful that early company didn't take off, otherwise I would have ended up as a VP or potentially even a C-level, but without ever advancing in the things that I enjoy.

I'm also not sure how long this advice will remain relevant. During the tech boom I saw insane career growth; multiple people going from very first job to Director level and above at what eventually were publicly traded companies in just a few years. Things weren't always this insane, and I doubt that will stay that way much longer.

It becomes a bigger risk/reward scenario for joining companies.

First, IME it suffices to join an organization poised for rapid growth. This can still happen in large tech companies.

Second, while luck matters, there's also stuff you can do to increase your chances of being picked for career growth roles. I'm at a growth company. Recently a relatively new engineer was picked to lead a project over some more tenured, well-liked folks who wanted it. The new guy got it because he has done some really incredible work recently and then marketed it internally well enough that management (and engineering) all agreed he'd be the perfect fit. Politics, making sure that resources are allocated the way you want them, is a skill all its own.

The unfortunate reality of those high growth orgs is precisely that the growth leads to a lot of new managers, and as we all probably know by now, a new manager is a bad manager. Since they have no idea of what they are doing, having the best relationship with them as possible is the only thing that matters.

I've seen the best ICs, and the most effective managers, end up quitting/getting PIPed due to politics. I've seen low performance being rewarded by teams with good bonuses and no deliverable objectives in 2 years, and promotions before ever shipping anything. My evaluation of my performance, and resulting reviews and raises, have minimal correlation: But they absolutely correlate on how much my manager liked me. The more I've focused on this, the better the rewards, the product be damned.

This is extra-true in those rocket ship companies, precisely because things for the company are likely to go well regardless of short term performance: Only major failures, (like what Raylene describes in the article as avoiding being critical) can get you in trouble for actual company impact. In those cases your best bet is to be the firefighter who is also an arsonist, and find ways to sell your solutions to problems you yourself caused... but that involves far too much work.

If your manager is on the precipice of being fired you’re in a bad spot. This is also true of PMs. At mega corps you can and should change teams but in a rocket ship company there probably are no processes for that and even bringing it up is risky.

I don’t really have any advice here other than to be aware of it. My last job I got hired on to work under a guy with a lot of juice but then six months later he got promoted and I ended up with a rookie manager. Maybe I should have made a stink back then

Never even considered that until this moment. But now that I am thinking in retrospect about the previous teams I worked on, it rings 100% true. Even when the manager's manager wasn't super into the manager, as long as the manager was savvy and had "juice", it was always enjoyable work, and things (such as actual progress on deliverables, good decisions, etc.) always happened. I just could never pinpoint until now why those specific times felt the best.

Ironically, the only time I had an absolutely incompetent manager and a pretty savvy and great manager's manager, it was awful. The only saving grace was that the manager's manager eventually moved the manager into a different role in a different part of the org after an explosive argument. But that stretch was probably the most standstill and stagnated period of my career.

I'm afraid this describes the majority of busy work in many industries including so-called software engineering. It's the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine of global proportions, where the major time-consuming problems are often self-inflicted, intricately constructed to seem like a solution but is actually a generator of problems, which conveniently sustain the careers of countless managers, hapless subordinates, and the economy involving the industry.

> The more I've focused on this, the better the rewards, the product be damned.

That's something I'm learning, is that it's not enough or even as important to be technically excellent. What matters is how one adapts and fits into the social dynamics and politics within the organization.

..and sometimes due to sheer shitty luck, even this doesn't work. Like in my most recent job, where me, my manager, and his manager were all laid off (oh sorry, "made redundant") from a profitable company because "business restructuring".

So say that in case A you get hired to maintain an old system that is on the path to deprecation, and in case B you get hired to work in a greenfield initiative that ends up exploding and generating tons of revenue. Even if you do the same good job in both cases, you are almost certainly going to be rewarded and promoted faster in the second case.

The key is that this compounds. If you have a higher job level, you tend to get better opportunities that help you grow further, which in turn means more promotions and/or bigger opportunities.

Usually they jump into the projects that have more visibility or hype, focus their work on the aspects the org considers most valuable for the "next step in the ladder" and jump ship to a different team/project/department as soon as possible.

I've seen that both on engineering and product sides, most of the people I worked with that progressed quickly in their career weren't actually reliable, at least not reliable to the people they worked closely with: they jumped ship to other teams/parts of the org as soon as possible, leaving just a trail of half-done initiatives that were just good enough to tick the boxes needed for a promotion.

Doing a good job is secondary to this, sometimes doing a good job aligns with the box-ticking, sometimes it doesn't really matter. If you are decent at salesmanship and persuasion, and can get some visibility from the upper echelons the actual delivery will only matter in 1-2 years, by then they're already out and up.

There are few small companies where this could work, otherwise dont rely on it, you will end up very sad.

Thanks. Exactly like that. In stable companies that do not grow, promotions are only possible if some dies or leaves. Which, in stable companies, can take FOREVER. I'd argue the majority of companies is like that, the majority of IT positions is like that.

It's easy as to spew clever career advice when you entered a company as senior software engineer at number 40 and became a director 3 years later when the company had 400 employees, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to the majority of people.

The best advice for success is always to get lucky.

The second best advice is to work smart / have good ethic.

The third is to work hard.

Unfortunately, most people think if they just work hard enough, they will succeed. And in many cases, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're not getting anywhere.

Your general accumulated connections and domain wisdom will probably carry you towards relative success. Bonus points if you’re useful.

Trajectory, not current state, is what matters most.